News, insights and updates from the Adobe Primetime team on TV delivery and monetization across IP‐connected screens

Author Archive: Blake Elmquist

About Blake Elmquist

Blake Elmquist is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Primetime, leading go-to-market strategy for Adobe’s multiscreen video and advertising solutions. Before Adobe, Blake held roles in corporate strategy and brand marketing in the CPG, airline and hospitality industries. Blake earned his MBA from the University of Texas, McCombs School of Business and received a BBA, with Honors, from SMU. Blake spends his free time balancing an insatiable appetite for Tex-Mex cuisine and the Dallas Cowboys.

There’s a growing body of research to support the fact that consumers prefer personalized TV viewing experiences over uniform TV experiences that recommend similar content, regardless of who is watching. Media companies can respond to this viewer expectation by accelerating their personalization efforts. Two key resources from Adobe can help:

A new article titled, “7 ways to personalize TV” dives into the data and technology necessary to make personalized TV work.

Specifically, the article highlights that media companies need data to understand viewers’ taste preferences and technology to infuse those preferences into a personalized experience that delights audiences. It goes on to show readers the 7 types of data and technology needed for personalized TV, including user data, session context, third-party data, segmentation, A/B testing, algorithms, and automated optimization.Be sure to read all about these building blocks for personalization.

TV boasts more channels, more programs, and more modes of access than ever before. Some audiences tune in via satellite TV, some via cable TV, and some via streaming TV across a huge range of devices. In response to this variety, advertisers are structuring their buys in more flexible, data-driven ways to ensure campaigns are reaching “fractionalized” audiences. Underscoring this point, Bokor says, “In TV, we’ve always bought audience. A demo is an audience. The issue is, how do we get more granular? ...how do we get more precise than the age/sex demo, which is a 50- to 60-year-old concept. It’s time to move beyond that. The old reason why you bought an age/sex demo to get high reach efficiently, it’s harder to get that same reach, and it’s more expensive”.

2. The business model for multiscreen TV will continue to evolve.

The evolving business model for multiscreen TV has to address the interests of consumers, advertisers, and TV providers. Consumers always want fewer ads. Advertisers always want a better return on ad spend. TV providers and content programmers always want to grow revenue. Bokor has a pretty clear idea of what it will take to achieve these objectives. It will take capabilities like precision targeting, frequency control, and attribution. And, it involves some enhanced technical capabilities, too. Bokor says, “We would be willing to support greater rates if you give us some of the things that we want – impression by impression buying with passback, being able to bump up an ID against our DMP [data management platform], decide whether or not we want that impression, precision target the audience that we want, frequency control, things like that – then it’s a conversation.”

With greater precision and higher rates, comes a decrease in ad loads and an improved viewer experience. In each scenario, experimentation has a significant role to play. For example, Newman thinks there may be ways to capitalize on consumers’ binging behavior, as viewers are highly engaged when they watch five episodes a day. Or branded content could play a bigger role. Lowy says, “You’re going to see a lot more different ways to bring in money within content itself. So you have to be very careful of what that does to the content because somewhere, some way, the revenue has to come in, and that’s a dance that you have to look at as you move on.”

3. Advertisers want to measure frequency, reach, and attribution among individuals, not devices.

Digital, IP-based platforms have the greatest potential to give advertisers what they want, which is the ability to measure the frequency, reach, and attribution of TV advertising across individuals, not devices. Clearly, advertisers don’t want to measure one person as if they were three people, just because the person uses three devices. This distorts all the measurements that the advertiser cares about. Instead, advertisers want to connect all TV viewing for each individual to a single user profile and only then measure the effectiveness of TV advertising. This can be done for streaming TV, for example, with device graph technology that can connect a smartphone ID, tablet ID, and OTT device ID to a single anonymous profile. Bokor says, “That really gives us the possibility to get that cross-platform reach, frequency, and attribution in a much cleaner way and in a census way, as opposed to a panel way. I think it’s going to be more accurate, and that, to me, is sort of the holy grail.”

4. The new OpenAP ad targeting platform by Fox, Turner and Viacom helps solve for fragmented media inventory, but not addressable advertising, and serves as a sign that data ownership will be under the microscope.

OpenAP helps solve for fragmentation because it allows advertisers to define audience segments and do index buying across inventory that would normally exist in silos. Newman says that this “creates a pool that can reach targetable television audiences at scale.”

Index buying at scale is a step in the right direction, but it’s not addressable advertising. With index buying, advertisers identify and purchase shows that index well for a specific audience. In contrast, with addressable advertising, advertisers identify and purchase impressions to reach only those people in their target audience. Lowy says that index buying is “a different way to target advertising, not as rich as, obviously, addressable or audience-based targeting.”

It will take significant collaboration between programmers, distributors, and networks to do addressable linear TV advertising at scale. This suggests that data will be a point of negotiation in new carriage deals. Lowy says, “There is more time and effort in those negotiations, discussions about over the top, TV Everywhere, and other methods. All these things have been added into the discussions now that weren’t in seven years ago, five years ago.”

Media buyers want to know if multiscreen TV ads are driving return on ad spend. This task is largely in the hands of advertisers because they are in the best position to define and measure the key performance indicators of their business. Bokor says, “The reality is that it depends on the brand, what their key performance indicators are, what their goals are, and what data is available. There is no magic bullet.”

Media sellers want to provide the metrics that unlock the spending. This is difficult because it requires identifying a metric that’s meaningful to all buyers and that’s technically feasible to track. Newman says, “Technical complexity and thinking about whether the metrics actually serve the best interests of everybody in the ecosystem, I think, are two other issues from a measurement standpoint.”

6. Streaming TV belongs on big screens and should be supported by ads.

Consumers have more control over the TV viewing experience than ever before. With this control, they tend to favor big screens over small screens. For example, 80–85 percent of Sling TV ads are being run on the OTT platforms through Chromecast, Roku or Apple TV. Bokor says, “if you look at time spent, OTT, or over the top, it’s already quite significant. From what I’m seeing, when you’re talking about episodic TV content, half hour or hour shows and movies, the vast majority of the viewing is on the large TV screen, not on a desktop, not on a mobile. Hulu is the bellwether. Hulu’s views, 75 percent are on a TV. So, I think what you’re going to see is that the viewing on IP-based streaming of long-form content is going to continue to be on a television.”

Some effort may be required to get consumers to favor ad-supported content over paid content. With downloads and Netflix viewing of prior seasons, you can have a show where a relatively low percent of the current viewing is ad supported, according to Newman. Considering this, he says, “The collective distributor, advertiser, agency, publisher ecosystem needs to think about how we maintain, and work creatively together, to maintain the TV model, whatever it is. It’s engaged viewing in an ad supported basis, and people are not having to pay for it incrementally.”

Conclusion

In short, digital TV advertising offers significantly more control than traditional TV advertising. The content and screens may ultimately look very similar, but the underlying technology is dramatically better in a digital environment for areas like targeting, attribution and yield management. This calls for a dramatic improvement in how media sellers package and price TV audiences and content, which Adobe is doubling down on for TV publishers with TV Media Management (TVMM). For a quick overview of TVMM, check out this video:

Adobe Summit is just around the corner. This year’s digital marketing conference will host over 12 thousand marketing and analytics professionals who will learn how to better understand their customers and create digital experiences that matter. Here are the event details:

For attendees in the Media & Entertainment industry, Adobe Primetime will be hosting three sessions featuring thought leaders and best practices for engaging and monetizing digital TV audiences. Please join us for these sessions:

The convergence of audience-based advertising across linear and digital TV represents a $94B market opportunity. In order to maximize ad value & efficacy across screens, we’ll need a common approach to audience-based transactions that is enriched by data and viewer-level measurement. In this discussion, we address three core tenets that media buyers and media sellers must understand to achieve maximum ROI: Measurement, Identity and Reach.

Viewers have come to expect a personalized and holistic TV experience, whether they’re watching in the living room or on their mobile phone. To meet this new standard, media companies must use data to deliver the right content at the right time. Hear how to increase viewer engagement and better monetize audiences with video recommendations, automated personalization, and A/B testing.

As part of a super session about the Media and Entertainment industry’s digital transformation, Adobe’s Jeremy Helfand, Vice President, Media & Entertainment Industry Solutions, will be hosting a keynote chat with Eric Black, CTO, NBC Sports Digital & Playmaker Media. The discussion will focus on the evolution of digital TV and how NBC Sports and Playmaker Media are redefining live digital coverage of global sporting events.

Eric will be sharing his experiences and predictions with the audience including when he first realized how significant live streaming was going to be for NBC Sports and how he would describe the evolution we are in now.

If you’re going to Adobe Summit, we hope you catch these sessions, explore the latest tools and trends, hear from marketing innovators, and see how other companies like yours are using Adobe Marketing Cloud. To learn more about the full agenda for Media & Entertainment professionals, visit summit.adobe.com/na/sessions/industry-sessions/.

This year, Adobe’s TV Everywhere solution celebrates its 5th anniversary, and we’re proud of everything we’ve worked with customers and partners to accomplish. Over the last five years, Adobe Primetime authentication has enabled 580 MVPDs to grant pay-TV customers online access to television and film content for 138 TV channels, across all the most popular connected devices. During that time, active TVE users have grown to represent over 20 percent of all pay-TV households. And, with plans underway to drive continued growth, TVE is poised to reach 70 percent of all pay-TV households by 2018.

Netflix serves as a valuable barometer for the success of TVE. The industry leader has proven that 47 million U.S. households will not only watch TV over the internet on a regular basis, but they will pay to do so. Because TV Everywhere comes included in pay-TV subscriptions, it’s realistic to believe that adoption will reach 70+ million pay-TV households through increased awareness and continued improvements to the user experience.

Over the next 2 years, the Adobe Primetime team will be working closely with customers and partners to help realize the enormous growth potential of TV Everywhere. Our initiative to reduce sign-in friction will be a critical component to this growth. Cumbersome sign-in requirements have been an impediment to consumer adoption of TV Everywhere since its inception. When consumers are frequently asked for a username and password, they often give up and go elsewhere. The following developments will help minimize this friction:

Single sign-on from Apple devices

Consumers need a way to navigate between hundreds of TV Everywhere properties without hitting a sign-in wall on each app and site. The authentication technology that allows for this is called single sign-on. Adobe Primetime has been working with Apple since June to bring single sign-on to Apple devices, available now to consumers. TV distributors including DirecTV and Dish have already enabled single sign-on for Apple TV, and viewers can access apps from Disney and FOX to NBC and Food Network.

Universal single sign-on and home-based authentication

CTAM, the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, is working with the TV industry, including Comcast and Adobe, to support “a new, universal, scalable solution” for TV Everywhere that’s facilitated by home based authentication and single sign-on. These two authentication technologies work perfectly together because home based authentication allows consumers to bypass the sign-in wall entirely if they are viewing TV Everywhere content from home and then single sign-on ensures that the authenticated access applies across all TV Everywhere sites and apps.

Relaxed authentication requirements through concurrency monitoring

By 2018, we believe that 100% of TV Everywhere sites and apps will use concurrency monitoring to limit fraudulent viewing behavior. This technology gives pay-TV operators the confidence to relax sign in requirements by ensuring the enforcement of concurrency rules, across both owned properties and federated sites and apps. By extending this level of control to operators, programmers will benefit from the ability to offer a superior user experience, with less frequent log-ins required.